Downworthy: Browser plugin to tone down hyperbolic viral headlines | Hacker News Reader

Downworthy: Browser plugin to tone down hyperbolic viral headlines

downworthy.snipe.net

63 pointsbane15 comments

This is funny but why stop at the headline? These rags exist purely to leech and hijack traffic and that defines more than just their headlines. The example URL was stolen from Reddit and as per the norm attributed in such a slimey, parasitic way there's no reason to go to the source after -

http://www.viralnova.com/grandpas-attic/ + http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1vgnt9/medical_chest_i...

A better solution is to stop rewarding plagiarism and shitty sensationalism with traffic. A plugin that redirects you to the original source. Or actively fighting it - Reddit and Facebook can shut it out any time they want.

Also the article mentions The Huffington Post almost in passing but I think they actually pioneered this - http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/how-the-huffington-post-use...

> A better solution is to stop rewarding plagiarism and shitty sensationalism with traffic. A plugin that redirects you to the original source.

The problem with shitty content is that there are people to propagate them around with Likes and Shares. Changing the reward pattern here falls in the realm of changing people's mindsets.

For plagiarism, getting to the source would help reduce traffic iff more people use such an extension.

For shitty sensationalism, there are two ways I can think of (there could be more) - a) the extension should block such links/content from feeds on social networks, but that would only help those who use the extension, without doing anything for social change and b) the extension should comment on such posts, pointing readers to a (simple and ad-free) site that explains the harm caused by such content (in addition to just wasting time).

This needs to be integrated with some sort of mouseover tl;dr of the actual article. (Like https://twitter.com/SavedYouAClick ).

Should change the title to "I couldn't believe what I saw: this browser plugin is hated by clickbait websites and the reason will blow your mind!"

Brilliant. I tried blocking everything buzzfeed from FB but it doesn't seem to work. At least I can be entertained now instead of annoyed by the clickbait.

Am I the only one that sees the level of biting sarcasm used on the filters this plugin provides to be roughly 10x as annoying as what it sets out to solve?

So we go from overblown to as written by the world's most petulant 13 year old. Not a improvement, IMO.

It's a funny concept, not something you are actually supposed to use.

Heh, it reminds me of cloud-to-butt.

"There have been similar plugins that came before this one that served as sources of inspiration in both execution and code, and they're worth checking out if you haven't already, most notably the hilarious Cloud-to-Butt plugin (https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt) by @panicsteve and the amazing Jailbreak the Patriarchy plugin (http://www.daniellesucher.com/2011/11/jailbreak-the-patriarc...) by @DanielleSucher."

Its entertaining to see what the plugin does to its own homepage:

    "One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit" becomes
    "One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit"

This is funny, but more practically I think I'd prefer a classifier that identified viral headlines and just replaced the link title with "[garbage]".

Relevant comic: http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2672

Why didn't it replace

    "Whoa" => "*yawn*"

in the first image?

Older version, maybe?

I'm laughing so hard at this. Amazeballs.

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